Reclaiming the Loch Ness Monster from the current tide of debunking and scepticism. If you believe there is something strange in Loch Ness, read on.

Friday, 13 April 2012

Defunct Nessie Websites

Hopefully this is a "Links" page with a difference. Ever had that frustrating feeling when you click on an interesting Nessie link only to find the page or entire website is gone? Having talked about past researchers and their works, I soon realised there was a number of old Nessie related websites out there which are below the radar and yet should be part of the historic record on the search for the Loch Ness Monster. These websites are now defunct and typing in their URLs merely results in HTTP "not found" errors or the parking pages of those annoying cybersquatters.

But just as visits to libraries to dig up old newspaper clippings and the like is an established method, the Internet is now old enough to have its own digital version. In that light, the Internet Archive WayBackMachine is valuable in digging up these old resources for us to research today. Their archive now stands at 2 petabytes (2 million gigabytes) with information on websites going back to 1996. Their work will prove to be an increasingly valuable resource to all researchers as time goes by and the lifetime of relevant websites continues to be linked to a person's health or commitment.

So below find links to the websites of Loch Ness researchers which for whatever reason are no longer maintained. Needless to say, you may not agree with everything they say, but they are part of the Loch Ness Story. Note also that current live websites are also part of the Internet archive and so you can type in URLs to see how these sites have changed over the years (i.e. websites may persist but not necessarily every page subsume under that URL). The one limitation is that higher memory usages items such as images will not be included, but I noticed that more recent webpage archives did include such items.

If you know of other inactive Nessie websites or pages, send me a comment/email and I will update this page.

Richard Carter was an active Nessie hunter back in the 1990s and contributed various Internet articles which are still live. His own website lapsed nearly 10 years ago and his own whereabouts and Nessie status continues to be a bit of a mystery.

The website of the Loch Ness Monster Research Society (LNMRS) run by Paul Harrison from 2001: link.

Paul Harrison continues to be active in Nessie research as his recent books demonstrate. However, his own LNMRS in the sense of a website is offline.

A thorn in the side to not a few Loch Ness researchers, Jan Sundberg ran his GUST expeditions to Loch Ness and various other cryptid lakes in years past but it seems he is on a prolonged sabbatical for some reason. His GUST website says he will be back but for now we link to his old website.

A well known figure with his mini-sub plumbing the depths of Loch Ness in 1969. He was working on a return trip but died in 2005.

The Academy of Applied Science pages on their Loch Ness hunts from 2007: link.

Robert Rines and his AAS expeditions are well documented and the AAS website ran some stuff on this which no longer seems available. An alternative version of this site can be viewed at this link under the old monsterhunters.org.

Lieve lived with Frank Searle during the 1970s as his assistant monster
hunter. She admitted though in a 2005 documentary that the relationship
went a bit further than watching the loch. Alternate link here.

6 comments:

I always found Beckjord to be an entertaining fellow (though I was banned from one Nessie forum in which I was a regular, frequent contributor because it was suspected that I was him -- for no reason besides our atypical shared spelling of "Erik"!), if for no other reason than his lunatic views.

However, his claims about Dinsdale hit a nerve and always stuck with me, causing me to wonder whether or not the allegations of "supernatural Nessie" belief were true. Something about it strikes me as plausible, but for no reason I can put me finger on. Perhaps the ongoing hunt and failure to replicate his original good fortune in April, 1960 began to make Dinsdale believe there was truth to the "Loch Ness hoodoo," as he put it...?

What were his claims about Dinsdale? Did Dinsdale (influenced perhaps by Holiday and others) begin to believe it was something supernatural -- related to fairy lore, kelpies, or the old Highland water horse legends?